02 June 2011

First, sorry for the long absence; tight money, boring work and an outrageous rent increase has been keeping my morale down. Many thanks to all who keep subscribed.

Now for the real topic of this blurb*: There's a really nifty script for Firefox'** Greasemonkey that converts a couple of US units into their metric counterparts that should help us rocket scientists understand all those countryside hicks. (Just teasing, keep your forks and torches at bay.) This omghax covers basic dimensions for length, weight, volume and temperature. Some might wish for additional and more complex conversions such as mpg to L/100km, BTU to kWh, and other things like Planck units, furlongs per fortnight, camel-litres per yard-fig*** … Whatever desired, thanks to the inherent open source character of Greasemonkey scripts, those units are only a few stirs in the inclined one's grey matter and a couple of keystrokes away. If only conversion to Atheism was that easy …

Shiny footnote collection:
* Wikipedia begs to differ about my usage of the word blurb, but I don't care, I use it merely for its onomatopeic value. BLUUUUUUUUUURB!!!
** Yes, that's the correct usage of a genitive apostrophe on a noun ending in an s sound. Even in English. Ask Lynne Truss. Seh knows punctuation and doesn't afraid of anything.
*** Can you guess what dimension this unit is for?

13 March 2011

Railroads have always been symbolic for progress, movement and wanderlust, even when they just cross through town as opposed to heading off to the horizon. Travelling to which place does this picture inspire you?

01 March 2011

I know I've been lazy in the last days. Much work, little time, and most of all: little sunshine. And we did have a picture with not-so-nice weather already, I believe. So, until I get the opportunity to shoot new interesting pictures I will give my dancing shoes a little polish, because Groupon has this smashing offer with Brighton Dancing: 10 hours of classes, including argentine tango, salsa, latin, ballroom and something they call 'keep fit' for just £22. A steal!

I will pick ballroom. Nothing beats confidence when surprising the ladies, and when you know how to tread, spontaneously grabbing a friend and secret long-time crush and playfully whirling her around is sure to light some fire! (Ladies, you're welcome to agree with me. :p) So head over to groupon.co.uk and join me on the dancefloor.

21 February 2011

As a place on the coast, Brighton is very windy, especially in so-called bad weather. We get some nice waves which crash noisily on the pebbles piled up on the beach. When a wave retreats, those pebbles produce a very distinctive sound.

We all have dreams, actors are no different. The dream of one Nathan Fillion is to be tightpants-clad again for new Firefly episodes. And why not, he's been stating that the show was, quote, "the best job [he's] ever had". And why wouldn't people like ex executive producer Jose Molina (episodes "Trash" and "Ariel") and ex writer Jane Espenson (episode "Shindig") chime in? It was a great show made of awesome, win and the most enjoyable chemistry between actors and crew for which anyone involved could only hope. So we don't ever really hear anything substantially new, except perhaps that Discovery's Science Channel has announced to air (to cable?) the show. Which is a good thing nonetheless. Firefly rightly deserves any publicity it can get.

And publicity it gets, boy. Browncoats aren't exactly new to petitions and fundraisers, so when Nathe outlined his plan to use yet-to-be-won lottery winnings to buy the Firefly rights and even produce new episodes they promptly set up a website and a Facebook page to get the ball rolling without the lottery fairy's intervention.

Maybe this thing won't take off, Fox has yet to comment anything. I wonder if they would sit on those rights like Chevron sat on the NiMH battery patent for electric cars. Yet, just wallowing in the thought of more Firefly will surely cause the odd nerdgasm. I know it did for me.

20 February 2011

Today's day was fairly uneventful mostly due to the weather being a dick. So here I present you with a picture from my archives in lieu of today's photo.

The days of carving "... was here" into benches and bonnets will most likely never be over, however not even this fascinating game of marking one's territory is safe from being turned into a high-tech variant.

The Euro Cent coin is 16.25 mm in diameter. In case you were wondering.

Precisely. I am talking about Geocaching. People arm themselves with little GPS-enabled gizmos and load them with a list of locations (or rather, vague oracles) of hidden containers. Containers like this, for example. Easily mistaken for a rubber-sealed bolt or a screw, this thing sticks to its surface with a magnet and holds a strip of paper for you to add your Geocaching nickname.

Is the Ricoh R10. I bought it because it features interval shooting with a minimum interval of 5 s. With an 8 GB SDHC, this baby wraps about 16 hours of footage into a ton of pictures ready to be converted into a timelapse movie.

Crucial accessory: power supply. It's a cheap wall wart with a battery dummy at the end of the cable. Cost: 45 EUR. Probable margin for Ricoh: 1000 %.

The sensitivity is shit. From ISO 400 this thing starts to produce noise like you wouldn't believe. I dropped it once and had to have it repaired because it just wouldn't give a sharp focus anymore unless zoomed in a bit. Sucked. Also, since it came back, dark areas have fine vertical lines about every three pixels or so. No friggin' idea how the cam manages to do this. Oh well. I take bright and big pictures, then resample them to a smaller size to get rid of noise. I also use Selective Gaussian Blur and Desaturation on a layer with all the dark areas to smoothen them. Works fine.

Also, this cam has problems to pick up green hues, they all turn somewhat blueish. Another job for the 'shop.

Ah well. Sorting through the pictures now and editing them. Stay tuned for the upload!

18 February 2011

Welcome to my blog. I'm a frog with a camera, hopping around the town of Brighton, UK, taking random pictures. Guess where I am and win ... nothing. But hey, this is the Internet, you won't lose anything either!